MIAMI — The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing abortion rights is likely to energize efforts to curtail or ban the procedures throughout Latin America, where countries have been slowly moving toward allowing women greater reproductive rights, experts say.
Deeply rooted religious beliefs in the region have long made it difficult for those advocating for abortion rights to prevail in changing the laws, though some nations allow abortions if a woman was raped or if her life is in danger, and a handful permit them at a woman’s request.
But the recent U.S. high court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade will breathe new life into efforts by anti-abortion groups to make the procedures more difficult if not impossible for women to obtain, especially in the Caribbean, abortion rights advocates say.
“After many years of hard work (by advocacy groups) we are now beginning to see the fruits, where we now have progressive legislation and court rulings in defense of human rights,” said Regina Tames, deputy director of the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “In the last five years we have seen important advances in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico, but even in countries such as Ecuador and Chile.”
These developments in Latin America form part of a global trend recognizing reproductive rights as a basic human right in compliance with a 2018 pronouncement from the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee stating that countries needed to revise their laws to decriminalize abortions.
The Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group promoting the right to choose, said the language used by the U.N. in its 2018 pronouncement helped to advance decriminalization in Latin America and around the world not only by establishing that abortion is a human right, but also by affirming that the right to life begins at birth.
The U.N.’s statement said criminalization of abortion could be considered a violation of women’s right to life. “States are obliged to ensure women and girls have access to affordable contraception, evidence-based sexual and reproductive health information, and that states prevent stigmatization of women and girls who seek an abortion,” the Center for Reproductive Rights said in its analysis of the U.N. decision.
U.S. influence
While abortion rights activists believe that the decriminalization trends will continue in Latin America, there is concern that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision will have a negative ripple effect in the region.
This is particularly true in a number of Caribbean countries, where a patchwork of laws banning abortion has led to some women traveling to Florida or even other Caribbean nations like Guyana to terminate a pregnancy.
The more immediate concern, said Fred Nunes, a social scientist and board adviser to the Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation who worked on liberalizing Guyana’s restrictions years ago, is that other countries in the English-speaking region will try to follow in the footsteps of the U.S. There is a rising tide of fundamentalist conservatism in the Caribbean region, he said.
“We have a tendency to be even more colonial than we were 50 years ago and to mimic the nonsense that happens in the U.S.,” he said. “I would think that this is a time for the pro choice groups and the Caribbean, the women’s groups and the Caribbean, to be really, really very forthright about where we stand.”
Nunes said his own research shows that despite the fact that termination of an unwanted pregnancy remains highly restricted in most countries in the Caribbean, “by age 44, most women in the Caribbean have had at least one abortion.”
The problem, he said, is that many people in the Caribbean do not speak up, including some of the women who have terminated their pregnancies.
“Abortion is widespread in the Caribbean, regardless of the laws,” he said. “The sociological facts are that the law in the Caribbean is comprehensively irrelevant to women who have money in their pockets, because they go to private physicians up and down the countries to get abortions. And there is no problem. They walk into doctors offices and ask for abortions and they get them. The only people who are affected by the law are the poor people who cannot afford that, and therefore they take risks.”
Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth, chief executive officer of the Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation, also fears the impact the U.S. Supreme Court decision will have, calling it “a monstrous act of social injustice.” Like Nunes, she believes it will have ripple effects in the Caribbean.
“It will have a negative impact in funding for family planning in the Caribbean,” she said, adding that the region already suffers from “high rates of unwanted pregnancies, including high rates of adolescent pregnancies. These have devastating impacts especially in exacerbating gender-based violence and increasing poverty.”
The Latin American map
As of now, only a handful of Latin American countries allow abortions at a woman’s request, regardless of reasons, with limits only in later stages of pregnancy: Argentina, Uruguay, Guyana, French Guiana, Cuba, Colombia and certain states in Mexico.
Colombia has moved the furthest in decriminalizing abortions, according to data from the Center for Reproductive Rights, allowing doctors to perform the procedure as late as 24 weeks into a pregnancy.
That is substantially longer than the period established by the other nations, with Argentina establishing the limit at 14 weeks, Uruguay at 12, French Guiana at 16 weeks, Cuba at 12 weeks and Guyana at eight.
In Mexico, laws are changing in a number of states after a recent decision from its supreme court stating that abortions should not be penalized, at least during the first weeks of a pregnancy, said Cristina Rosero, senior legal counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
The court ruling has led some Mexican states to decriminalize abortion and move toward a length-of-pregnancy model, in which a woman can have access to the procedure during the first weeks, but after which the abortions can be performed only under specific circumstances, she said.
Countries such as Venezuela, Paraguay and Peru allow abortions only if a woman’s life is at risk, while a number of countries, among them Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, also allow the procedures in cases of rape or incest. Abortion still is illegal in a small number of countries, including Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Suriname.
Women in peril
In the Dominican Republic, which has one of the strictest abortion bans, women who can afford it travel to Puerto Rico or other places where abortions are legal, but the option is out of reach for the majority of Dominican women.
A decade ago, a Dominican teenager named Rosaura Almonte died after a hospital delayed treating her leukemia because she was a few weeks into pregnancy, according to local media. Her death became a rallying cry for Dominican abortion rights activists.
“Women and girls, especially those who are most vulnerable and do not have the financial resources to travel or pay for it, are condemned to the law of the country and suffer these consequences, even death,” said Mariana Ardila, a Bógota-based lawyer for international women’s rights organization Women’s Link Worldwide. Her organization represents Almonte’s mother, who has been vocal about her daughter’s death. The case is currently before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Natalia Marmol, an abortion rights activist in the Dominican Republic, said that the country’s strict ban has led to a number of tragedies, including the death of a 9-year-old girl forced to give birth after she was raped and a pregnant mother of two who died from infection after the fetus died while in her uterus.
“They are the very clear, very visible, very tangible consequences of criminalization when the state turns its back on women’s health,” she said.
The Caribbean nation’s reproductive rights activists have for years advocated for the country’s laws to allow abortions for at least three reasons: if a pregnancy results from rape, if a woman’s life is at risk, or if a fetus would not survive outside the womb. President Luis Abinader has said that he supports abortions for the three exceptions.
“We are talking about whether they are carried out legally, with the protection of the state, with quality and timely health, guaranteed, or if they are carried out clandestinely, putting the lives and health of girls and women at risk,” said Marmol.
Regarding the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, she said the Dominican Republic should not be “a mirror” in which (the U.S.) would like to see itself reflected.
“What is going to happen in the United States is that there will be two countries,” she said, in which the laws vary by state. “One country that does recognize the right to decide and does provide quality and timely health care to women when they need it in these situations and a country in which their fundamental rights are denied and violated.”
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